Lecture Louis Henderson/The Living & the Dead Ensemble 09.06.22, 6 pm

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Lecture
Louis Henderson/The Living & the Dead Ensemble
Unfolding of life in a spiral

Thursday June 9th, 6 pm
Lichtbrücke, HfG

Unfurling like a fiddlehead fern frond in a forest, the word ‘creole’ comes from the Greek root *ḱer- meaning to grow, to nourish. Celebrating the great possibilities of translating both into and from Haitian Creole, this talk will describe how the artist group The Living and the Dead Ensemble was created through translating the play Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant, from French to Haitian Creole. The play was adapted and performed as a way to understand how to work together, and how to eventually write and improvise the film Ouvertures, that both documents the process and elaborates a fictional narrative. These different strategies of creating collective methodologies were informed by a certain understanding of mise-en-scene, in that we set the scene for the play and the film within which the performances can take place, and that also we create the space in which the Ensemble was able to come into being.

The lecture is a part of the series Scenography in the present - künstlerische Strategien für performative Raumentwürfe, organized by Prof. Constanze Fischbeck, Ebba Fransén Waldhör and students of the Department of Exhibition Design and Scenography.

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker and writer who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Henderson's films and installations have been shown in various international film festivals, art museums and biennials and are distributed by LUX and Video Data Bank. His writing has been published in both print and online in books and journals. At present, Henderson is a doctoral candidate at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy. His research looks into the riverscapes of the East of England and Guyana through "spiral retellings" of the works of Wilson Harris and Nigel Henderson. He lives and works in Paris and Berlin, and is a member of the SWRG.